School of thought
Epicureanism
School
Classification
- Period
- c. 306 BCE - 270 CE
- Regions
- europe
- Domains
- Ethics , Metaphysics
Overview
Epicureanism is the school Epicurus founded in the Garden at Athens around 306 BCE, and which survived in the Roman world into the third century CE. It identifies pleasure (hedone) as the highest good, but this is emphatically not hedonistic excess — the greatest pleasure is ataraxia, the absence of mental disturbance. Epicurus taught that the universe is composed of atoms and void, the gods do not intervene in human affairs, and death is simply the dissolution of atoms and therefore nothing to fear.
Key ideas
- Ataraxia: The goal of life is tranquility — freedom from anxiety (ataraxia) and bodily pain (aponia). Simple pleasures, friendship, and philosophical contemplation are the path.
- Death is Nothing: 'Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not.' Since we cannot experience death, fearing it is irrational.
- Atomic Swerve: Atoms occasionally swerve unpredictably, introducing indeterminacy into the cosmos and grounding human free will against strict determinism.
Key figures
Epicurus · Metrodorus · Lucretius
Influenced by
Later connections
- Classical Utilitarianism Influenced by this tradition
Bentham explicitly acknowledged Epicurean hedonism as an ancestor of the greatest-happiness principle's identification of good with pleasure.
- Stoicism Reacted to this tradition
The two schools competed directly on ethics (virtue versus pleasure) and physics (a providential logos versus the random swerve of atoms).
References
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Epicurus
- A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (2nd ed., 1986), ch. 2 (Epicurus and Democritean atomism)
- Letter to Menoeceus — Epicurus
- On the Nature of Things — Lucretius